Unlocking the power of people data

Beyond HR and across your business

Organisations often struggle with unreliable people data, impacting their ability to make informed decisions. This article highlights the importance of high-quality people data, offering strategies to improve data accuracy and effectiveness. Leveraging tools like OrgMaps and ensuring consistent data input can enhance strategic workforce planning, productivity, and organisation design.

Reading time: 5 minutes

“If organisations had the same quality finance data as their people data, then they wouldn’t pass their audit.”

As an organisation design consultancy, we work with people data a lot. It’s an important element of organisation design work. The better you understand the make-up of your organisation today, the more informed decisions you can make for your organisation in the future. Crucially, we believe that people data should not be seen as something that is used solely within HR, but as business data that can be leveraged throughout organisations to make strategic decisions.

Despite this, we see people data of all shapes and sizes and there is one continuous theme – that it is often unreliable and not suitable to make decisions with.

“Only a third of HR professionals believe their organisation effectively uses people data to make evidence-based strategic decisions”

In this article, we will outline the importance of good quality people data, tips for improving data quality, and highlight some of the decisions that can be made with good people data.

The basics

First, there are the basics. “How many people are in my team?”, “where are my people based?”, “how much does my team cost?”. These questions sound like they should be easy to answer, yet as organisations have become more fluid, spread across different offices and countries, this data has become more unreliable.

The standard insights that any organisation should get from their people data include:

1. Number of employees in the organisation
2. Cost of the workforce
3. Where employees are located
4. Distribution of employees across functions and teams
5. Turnover and retention rate

These are the core building blocks that build a picture of your organisation. Although these may seem like insights any organisation should have, it’s not always the case, often due to poor data input or disparate systems.

The potential

Having good quality people data unlocks the potential to make more data-driven decisions across your business, not just within HR. When used right, people data should be leveraged in organisations across a number of use-cases:

• Strategic workforce planning – good quality people data is a key input into Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). Without a clear and accurate view of your people data, it’s very difficult to map and analyse your current workforce; a key prerequisite before anticipating future workforce requirements. Being able to assess your workforce through a variety of different lenses, such as demographics, job levels, role types, competencies, and contract types will enhance your strategic workforce plan by identifying gaps or concerns.
• Understanding employee productivity – Understanding what drives productivity is vital in allowing the organisation to optimise its workforce. Being able to assess employee productivity, such as by calculating return on investment of the workforce and revenue per employee can identify your most efficient locations and compare the cost of delivering work across geographies or teams.
• Responding in a crisis – If you don’t know who your people are or where they’re located, your ability to respond in a crisis is significantly impeded. In contrast, if an organisation does have real-time, accurate people data, they can quickly mobilize resources, communicate efficiently, and proactively manage personnel during an emergency.
• Identifying people pain points in your organisation – The ability to assess your organisation by specific geographies, functions, or job levels allows you to extract useful insights when compared with other data sets, such as turnover rate or survey response data. For example, there may be a specific job level where turnover rates are double the average for the company, or employee satisfaction may be particularly low within a certain country. Having this intersection of data allows you to truly understand your organisation and identify where the issues are, so you can launch targeted interventions.
• Optimising organisation design – people data is unsurprisingly the most important set of data points for organisation design. Analysing key metrics that drive organisation effectiveness, such as spans of control, allows organisations to leverage their people data to review and improve how they operate.

Comparing spans of control with other performance indicators, such as employee productivity and satisfaction, can highlight areas of inefficiency. For instance, if high spans of control correlate with lower employee productivity, it may indicate employees aren’t getting the support they need to be most productive. Additionally, identifying inefficient reporting structures, such as instances of 1-to-1 reporting, can uncover quick wins to optimise organisation design or reduce cost.

What goes wrong?

Often, organisations have an expensive HR system, so they believe this should equate to good people data. Unfortunately, more often than not, this isn’t the case. We see companies not getting the most out of their systems, as their problem lies in the data input.

We have some recommendations to improve the quality of your people data:

• Ensure there is one source of truth – Processing data in silos will undermine the quality of insight and create confusion about what the right version really is, especially when the organisation spans across different offices or geographies. Consistent rules, formatting, and definitions are needed to ensure data is universally understood and perceived as reliable across the business. This will enable you to conduct more detailed and accurate comparisons across different teams, functions, or geographies.
• Regularly update information – To create confidence that reports are a correct representation of what the organisation looks like today, update data regularly. If out-of-date or incorrect information is pulled into a report, people will lose confidence in the data being provided.
• Ensure data input quality – Bad inputs = bad outputs. Clear rules about how data is collected, input, and stored will ensure the outputs are reliable and consistent.
• Think about using other tools – It is hard to spot mistakes in people data in huge Excel tables. Tools such as our own, OrgMaps, spot inconsistencies and errors in people data to simplify the process of improving your data quality.

How can we help you?

Q5 Partners

We are all about organisational health, which separates good organisations from the great. Whether our clients are at the top of their game (and want to remain there) or are in ‘turnaround’ mode, we all need to work on our organisational health.

Whatever the situation, be it a strategic conundrum, a market opportunity, or an operational gripe, we combine the art and science of organisational health to help our clients improve and excel.

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